CNN is reporting that the earliest known photograph of New York City has just sold for $62,500 at Sotheby's. A daguerreotype, it dates from 1848 and shows a house perched above an oval white-fenced piece of land overlooking the Bloomingdale Road.The Bloomingdale Road, built in 1703, joined Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the urbanized southern tip of Manhattan, at Union Square (23rd Street) and ran the length of Manhattan through Harlem and then into Westchester County.
I didn't think that Sotheby's would want me to use their photograph, so the illustration above is of another, similar house on the Bloomingdale Road, in 1847 - the year before the daguerreotype was taken. This is the Abbey Hotel, not the single-story home of the photograph - but the circular fenced-in front area, and rural atmosphere, is similar.
'Bloemendaal' was an area around 100th Street, named by Dutch settlers, presumably for the flowery meadows there. It was heavily wooded, though by the early eighteenth century the land had been cleared sufficiently for tobacco to be grown in significant quantities. As Jessica Lynn O'Brien points out in her excellent article on the area's history (see below for citation and link), the tobacco was brought down to the city via the Bloomingdale Road. For most of the nineteenth century, the Bloomingdale Road north of Central Park was a country road, along which lay farms, clusters of squatters' shacks, and large public asylums.
Bloomingdale village was situated roughly between Morningside Heights to the south and Manhattanville to the north (it is now known as Manhattan Valley). As late as 1888, the Atlantic Monthly noted: The Bloomingdale Road is a continuation of Broadway, taking its rural name at the point where the great city thoroughfare touches the southwestern triangle of Central Park. It is Broadway run out in the country, in fact, to enjoy a breath of fresh air. Right under the steep, woody bank that slopes to the west from this road runs the Hudson River Railway, and much of the intervening ground is occupied by market-gardens.
In the late 1840s and for decades after, Bloomingdale was a farming area, with a few riverside mansions and hotels. It was also home to a several asylums. The most famous of those was the Bloomingdale Asylum which opened in 1821, the first public asylum in New York State. In 1896 Columbia University moved from its 49th Street campus to the grounds of the old Bloomingdale Asylum, which was moved to White Plains in Westchester County.Note: The famous New York department store of the same name was not named for the village or the road, but for its two founders, brothers Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale, whose father was Bavarian.
Here is the enlarged version of the 1848 photograph over at CNN.
Image of Abbey Hotel in Bloomingdale from NYPL Digital Gallery.
Image of Bloomingdale Asylum from NYPL Digital Gallery.
Modern map of the Bloomingdale/Manhattan Valley area in northern Manhattan, is from Geocities; it shows a small area still called Bloomingdale.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Dolkart, Andrew S. Morningside Heights. (Columbia UP, 2001), p. 13.
Haskel, Daniel and John Calvin Smith, A Complete Descriptive and Statistical Gazetteer of the United States of America (Sherman and Smith, 1843), p. 469.
O'Brien, Jessica Lynn. "Unearthing Bloemendaal," The Cooperator (Sept 2002), link here.
Thaxter, Celia, Sarah Orne Jewett et al. The Atlantic Monthly (v. 22, 1868), p.iv.
Watson, Edward B. and Edmund Vincent Gillon. New York Then and Now (Dover, 1976), p. 34.
Forgotten NY on Manhattanville and the Bloomingdale Road.
A photograph of the Bloomingdale Road about 1895 is here.
Modern map of the Bloomindale/ManhattanValley area in northern Manhattan, which shows a small area still called Bloomingdale.
Bloomingdale Asylum in an 1892 photograph.
There is still one asylum building on the Columbia campus, see here.
The 104th Street Block Assocation has a site called Bloomingdale.org, with some good photos.
Bllomingdale village chronology here.
Who would have thought that the desire for Jell-O would make a woman act so suspicious and sneaky? She's whispering into the telephone, and looks positively guilty. 
Here is what awaited you in Nashville probably in the 1860-1890 period (there is no date on this, according to Duke University, link below). There were plenty of vapor baths in American cities - one of my Barnett several-great aunts had a dear friend whose husband, Professor Balbo, ran 
"Girlhood vigor" is equated with a healthy stomach in this 1912 advertisement for a medicine called Psychine, from the 
"As Houdin is in Paris, so Heller is in New York," says the 
Heller was famous for several innovations, especially the trick known as "the Second Sight Mystery." In this, the magician's assistant stands in the audience selecting people. The magician on stage tells them what they are holding (concealed from him), as if by magic. Heller and his assistant pulled this off by communicating through a clever code. The code was roughly as follows:
In this 1864 
I'm working on a post about a Victorian-era magician who had some very modern tricks up his sleeve - but here's a little something to look at while I'm getting that together. Something that looks like a magic trick gone wrong, actually.
Victorian England's answer to the mythical alligators that were said to have roamed free in the sewers of New York City were the feral pigs or "black swine" which were said to have lived in the sewers of Hampstead, London in the early 1850s. By the 1850s, the sewers of London were a higgledy-piggledy mess (as it were) until civil engineer 
The urban sewer is a particularly frightening symbol of a dark and dangerous underworld teeming just below the surface of the mundane, regulated everyday world. The story of wild pigs (or alligators) living and waiting in the dark tunnels under city streets was a fascinating translation of earlier stories about the underworld. And of course, Lewis Carroll was writing his tale of Alice's journey down a rabbit hole (far nicer than the sewers of Hampstead, though equally dark and confusing), originally titled 
This week we are going to go looking for those 
Happy 
Here's what the well-dressed dude of 1900 was wearing to go fishing in Brooklyn! Brooklyn still, in 1900, had rural pockets, such that a fishing-tackle store could flourish in what was the downtown core, near City Hall. That nice white Colonel Sanders suit is going to get a tad dirty though.
A famous New York City urban legend is that of the Sewergator - the legend of alligators living in the sewers, breeding and wandering around and occasionally popping up to frighten people.
The Collect, which is called the "Collet" in this article, was "at one time rumored to be the resort of an enormous serpent." The Eagle reporter thought that this was "a stray alligator, driven by currents [which] might have been brought in by some vessel." Embury also told a story about himself and some other boys finding a foot-long lizard-like creature with red eyes and bat wings, on a tree next to the pond. He said he hadn't seen the enormous serpent, though.
Uncle Ben Jo has something called Bell Tongue Syrup for us all; but what exactly does this mean?
Cora Dow Goode is a fitting subject for today, as it is 
Here is an innovative 1901 baby swing that has everything - it is a bed, jumper, rocking chair and high chair, in turns. But the rocking chair suspended above the floor does look a little bit strange...and potentially dangerous. I am not sure why the physicians were endorsing it.
The little alley in Brooklyn Heights called Red Hook Lane was once truly a lane "overspread with leafy branches." Built in 1760, Red Hook Lane had been the main thoroughfare between Brooklyn and the village of Red Hook, a point (in Dutch, "hoek") named for its red-clay soil. The Lane is now a shade of its former self, a tiny one block long alleyway between Boerum Place, Livingston Street and the Fulton Mall. It is in the middle of the map detail on the left, just below Fulton Street and slightly SE of Borough Hall. Below and at right is a 1931 photograph of the remnants of Red Hook Lane. It is somewhat east of where Charlotte Melmoth's cottage once stood, and where a man was frightened to death by ghosts.
English actress Charlotte Melmoth was one of the leading ladies of the American stage at the end of the 18th century. She was known for her portrayals of Elizabeth I, Mrs. Malaprop and Lady Macbeth, among other roles. She had been a successful actress in her native England, too.
Charlotte was the estranged wife of actor/author Courtney Melmoth, whose real name was Samuel Jackson Pratt. She was born in 1749, possibly the daughter of a farmer, and made her acting debut at Covent Garden. She and Courtney were in France in the late 1770s; Courtney managed to meet Benjamin Franklin in 1777 in Paris, and early in 1778 sent Franklin a series of letters in which he asks for money and shows off Charlotte's poetry skills.
After Charlotte's death in October 1823, her house became a tavern. A young man named Boerum had been drinking there with a group of friends and they had run out of whiskey. Boerum volunteered to ride down Red Hook Lane to the Fulton Ferry and get some more. He never came back. Finally, after midnight, his friends went looking for him. They found him lying in the middle of the lane, grasping an empty liquor jug, his face frozen in a grimace. His horse was standing nearby. They took Boerum back to the tavern but he never regained consciousness, and died a few days later. It was said that he had seen a ghost in the abandoned Suydam house, and died of fright.
I'm working on a story for tomorrow about a British actress and a haunted house in Brooklyn, but I wanted to share this amazing Victorian photograph (or rather, series of photographs) today.
It has turned out to be a medicinal weekend here, somewhat by chance. So we will turn to other things in the week to come.
